


but shrapnel is shrapnel

by hallotheism



Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: Accidental friendship, F/M, Gen, Post-Season/Series 02, Rating May Change, Recovery, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-03-24
Updated: 2016-04-03
Packaged: 2018-05-28 18:27:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,019
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6340444
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hallotheism/pseuds/hallotheism
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It starts like this: Karen gets a dog.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. him being you

i. It starts like this: Karen writes 2,000 words about surviving, and then falls asleep with a gun under her pillow. 

In the morning, things don’t exactly look better, but there is a weight lifted slightly off her chest, a clarity that comes from the knowledge that one part of her life is over now, unreachable, frozen in some place in the past. She will leave it there, in that place, like she always does. A distant place where she still sees her two best friends every day, and she is paid in homemade pastries and laughter and good things, and the man she fell in love with never lies.

(“There’s something I need to show you,” he’d whispered, his hand holding out the red cowl like an empty skull, and the ground beneath her feet starts to crumble.)

She closes her eyes. Takes a deep breath. Thinks, _breakfast_ , before pushing away the memory of the look on Matt’s face when she’d picked up her coat and walked out.

Trying to find a plate that hasn’t been shattered by the hail of bullets from the week before is a trial, but she manages. She has to check the date on her phone to believe it, because really? Her whole life destroyed in under a week? You’d think she’d be used to it by know, now that she’s on her third try. Is there a limit? She wonders. Will she know when she’s used up her chances? When she's done being lucky? 

Probably not. Life isn't known for giving her warnings, but that's another story.

There’s nothing that’s not expired in her fridge, but there’s her breakfast tea in the cabinet and some dry cereal on the lower shelf, so she munches on that while her kettle--surprisingly still in tact--does its best to heat up.

She leans against the counter and thinks, coffee. I should buy coffee. She never really liked coffee, but all of the sudden, the exhaustion sinking itself into her bones, she needs it, like a physical ache.

The wall across from her is littered with holes. The police have done their best to clean up the crime scene in the interim, and her landlord has gotten rid of the debris, but suddenly part of her wants to duck—the urge so powerful her knees start to buckle of their own will, until she’s sitting on the floor of her war-torn apartment with a box of cereal clutched to her chest while the kettle starts to scream.

She listens to the shrieking wail for a good minute before reaching up to flick of the knob to the flame. She doesn’t feel safe enough to get up off the cold tile for a long time.

It might not feel like much of a beginning, but it is.

 

ii. Really though, it starts like this: Karen gets a dog.

It’s Foggy’s idea, actually. They talk on the phone once or twice a week, mostly on Foggy’s insistence (Karen isn’t used to dragging her old life alongside her, this is unfamiliar territory; sometimes she forgets she isn’t running anymore). Both of them are settling in to their new respective jobs with a vengeance that stinks of desperation, for some kind of order, for neat lines of text in this new chapter of an old book. (They don't talk about Matt, but he's always there, hidden in the too-long pauses in their conversations.) 

Karen can’t start from scratch this time, she doesn’t have the resources, and she can’t afford a new apartment no matter how much she hates looking at the string of bullets burrowed into her soft, yellow walls, precisely at head height, and even though all the locks are newly changed and the security system updated and the broken windows replaced, she still wants to crawl across the floors to her bedroom every night. Walking upright to the bathroom makes her nervous. The 3-inches of wood that makes up her front door seems as thin as paper. She can’t sleep, and she knows its starting to show.

Over one of their rare, spontaneously matching lunch hours, Foggy says, “Well, the shelter on 42nd street is open till 4? How do you feel about getting a little furry roommate... maybe that would help?”

The waitress comes by and refills her cup while she’s mulling it over. “Anything else, you two?”

Foggy looks up, shakes his head and smiles. “I’m great, thank you.” The woman turns.

“And how bout you? Ma’am?”

Karen starts, ripping her eyes away from the swirl of black coffee in the cup. “Oh, um. No. I’m fine, too, thanks.” The waitress shrugs and leaves.

Foggy is watching her, concerned. “Karen? Hey, you with me?”

Karen nods jerkily, staring at the table, decidedly not thinking about bruise-black eyes and bloody knuckles wrapped around a chipped diner mug, or the solid weight pressing her into the floor, surrounding her on all sides as the world falls apart again. She doesn’t think about the thunderous heartbeat thumping a tattoo against her shoulderblade, or the stretch of the hand curved around the back of her head, fingers soft in her tangled hair. She doesn’t think about the pause between the bullets, and the harsh sound of breathing.

Instead she takes a long sip of too-hot coffee and says, “Yeah, Foggy. A dog …could be good.”

 

iii. “They found him wandering around the lot near 48th and 10th,” says the attendant, running a gloved hand over the pitbull’s flank. The dog is leaning it’s broad head heavily on the lip of the exam table while they bandage him up again, but he’s healthy, with clear sharp eyes and when Karen steps into the room to wash her hands in the sink, his ears perk up in interest. She and Foggy have already perused the cages in the back, going slowly, trying to find an animal that _fits_ , all the while Foggy trying adamantly to prove to her that a cat would be _perfect_ , _just right for you, you know— very sweet but also very evil_.

Karen laughs and looks through the cat cages, too, just in case— but then the dog lifts its tired head and stares at her, like it recognizes something there, and when she walks over to the table to say hello it leans down and snuffles its cold nose deep into the palm of her hand. Karen flinches.

The attendant glances at them. “Don’t worry. He won’t hurt you.”

 _I know that_ , she thinks, irrationally angry, and doesn’t look up from where the dog’s head tilts up towards her. There are scars all over his face and neck. Its eyes are very dark. “What happened to him?”

“Fight, probably,” says the attendant. “It happens a lot. The animals in the park go feral after a while, but this guy here looks like he’s had a pretty rough go of it, but he’s pretty calm around people. He might be a runaway if it weren’t for the scars.”

“Will he be put up for adoption?”

The attendant shrugs. “Maybe. But I doubt he’ll be picked up. People don’t often see past the teeth.”

The dog whines softly, sinking back down, but when Foggy startles them both by jerking open the side door the dog’s head whips up and the warning growl that rolls out from his chest shakes the metal table under her palm. Foggy freezes, one foot comically half-raised.

“Um, hey. Holy shit. I’m just gonna…” he steps back out slowly and closes the door. Once he’s safely behind the glass, he looks at her, points at the dog, and mouths “KAREN. NO.”

She puts her hand softly on the dog’s spine and he settles, immediately.

“Good boy,” she whispers.  

 

 

iv. She names him Bird, because that’s what she tells her landlord when he asks her what she’s bringing home after signing the Animal Request Forms. There’s no technical rule against animals in the building, but she’s already a maintenance disaster of a tenant and she doesn’t want to push her luck by asking for a pitbull on the second floor.

Karen is lucky Bird is as quiet as he is, growling often enough when someone walks by her apartment door at night, or when branches scratch against the glass of the window panes, but he rarely ever barks at shadows. She feels—not safe, but… better, for the first time in months.

Bird helps her settle into her new life faster, considering the hours of her new job at the Bulletin are somewhat unorthodox. Having Bird only a few blocks away from the office is good for her, like an escape, her long walks with him in the morning and after lunch helping her to structure her articles and brainstorm her pieces before typing them out, a slow moment of peace in the chaos of everything else. (She doesn’t walk him at night anymore, not only out of fear, but also out of a strange sense of paranoia, like the rooftops are watching her while she makes her way home. Sometimes she thinks she sees horns. She tries not to think about it.)

It’s on one of these early mornings, before the sun is even up, where she’s walking Bird along the boardwalk—well, Bird is more walking her, tugging at the leash incessantly, searching for something in the gravel like a bloodhound while she stumbles behind. The only other people out on the walkway are the bundled up joggers and the occasional hobo. It’s still and grey and peaceful, until Bird lifts his head, stills, and then tries to charge forward out of nowhere.

“Birdie, hey, _relax,_ ” she pulls back hard until he settles a bit, turning to look up at her with his big, dark eyes as if he’s personally wounded she’s not full of excitement over muddy sidewalk gravel. He whines pitifully and twists his head towards the edge of the walkway, nose still tilted up in the breeze. Something near the trees is distracting him, maybe an animal, or, no, the hunched-over shape on a bench near the grass? Karen sighs. She’s doesn’t have any money to give away, and she doesn’t want to deal with a drunkard this early in the day, so she tries to turn them onto another path so they’re not a bother. Bird doesn’t budge.

Karen sighs, louder this time. “Honestly. Bird, sit.” His bottom grudgingly hits the rocks with a thump. She loosens her grip on his leash for a moment and drops to a crouch to bribe him over with treats, but as soon as the leash slackens, he bolts.

“Shit—fuck, BIRD,” she shouts, shoving herself to her feet and chasing after the blur of gray fur as the dog tears towards the slouched figure on the bench. She can’t see the figure’s face from this direction, but she’s already got an apology on her lips and is praying to God the poor guy won’t freak out and sue when the figure turns towards them and his gray hoodie falls back just as Bird leaps onto the bench and burrows his face under the guy’s chin. Karen freezes.

Large, scarred hands emerge from the man’s coat pockets, scabbed over knuckles curving gently as he presses down onto Bird’s head, scratching roughly behind his ears, just where he likes it, and her dog’s tail thumps wildly against the bench seat as Bird looks back at her over his shoulder smugly as if to say LOOK WHAT I FOUND.

Frank Castle looks up finally from where Bird has shoved himself under an arm, the barely there grin on his split lip fading when he sees her. Bird’s tail is still wagging incessantly. She shakes herself out of it and makes her way forward.

“Hi, Frank,” she says softly, and something about it sounds unbearably loud in the stillness of the morning.

He blinks slowly, looking at her like she’s a ghost, and then drops his chin.

“Ma’am.”

Bird nudges his hands from where they’ve stopped scratching his ears, frozen. Frank automatically starts up again, still watching her silently, and suddenly she knows somehow that if Bird weren’t here with her, on this bench right now, huffing happily under the man’s hands, Frank would’ve bolted the moment he’d seen her. The look on his face suggests he knows it, too.

Something about that thought, that Frank might be afraid of _her_ , sends something bubbling up from her belly like a balm, and the tension just leaks out of her frame. She breathes out a laugh and sits down on the far edge of the bench, Bird panting excitedly between them.  

“Nice morning for a walk,” she says, overtly casual, as she stares out from the bench and holds out the dog treats in her hand. After a long moment, he takes them, his fingers brushing her glove covered palm briefly. For a strange moment she’s never hated her mittens so much in her life.

“Yeah.” His eyes flick over her, lightning quick, like he’s cataloguing something, the black ballcap pulled low over his face. He nods again, almost to himself, before letting Bird sloppily gobble up the treats. She can feels him relax against the bench. “Looks like rain,” he says, just as casually.

Her lips quirk and she doesn’t bother to hide it. “Sure does.” She leans back. A jogger runs past, barely giving them a glance. They must look so normal, she thinks. Just two average people sitting on a bench near the river. Just two average people, who’ve never killed anyone, and a dog.

How strange.

Frank’s gaze follows the jogger until they’re out of site— his hand still studiously scratching away--before he looks over at her curiously. “Bird?”

She shrugs. “Apartment doesn’t usually allow big pets. But if we get caught it’s what the papers say, so. Not technically a lie.”

He snorts, amused in spite of himself, and something in her warms at the sight of the smile tugging at his mouth. “Thought you were some big shot reporter now. Not lawyerin'.”

“And how would you know what I am?” she retorts, ignoring how the words make her lungs press in tight. Bird nuzzles her hand, eyes squinted in contentment.

The tips of Frank’s ears are slowly getting red. “I read some,” he lifts his hand for a moment and waves it vaguely, “of, you know, your stuff. Writing. S’not bad.” He’s still not looking at her. There’s a yellowing bruise coloring the side of his jawline, and something that looks suspiciously like a knife wound on the side of his neck. He’s in a hoodie, jacket and jeans right now, but something tells her the black bag under the bench at his feet isn’t carrying old gym clothes. The breeze turns in her direction, and for a moment, she can smell gunpowder.

But his hands are soft on Bird’s skull. He looks at her, and there is no pity. The heartbeat that’s been sitting in her throat for so long is quiet, settling into her chest for the first time in days. She feels steady, somehow more awake than she did just moments ago, and when she looks at the tendons flexing smoothly in hands, the black bruises healing around the bridge of his nose, the strong line of his throat tilted back in the dim grey light-- she thinks of how they looked last time she saw them, slick red, covered in another man’s blood. (It doesn’t bother her as much as it should.)

Karen waits for the fear to set in, but it never comes. She blinks. Once. Twice.

“Hey, Frank,” she says instead, as the sun peaks out over the skyline, “you had breakfast yet?”

A split knuckle taps the lid of his ballcap to tilt it up. Frank leans back and throws his free arm over the back of the bench as he sucks his teeth, pretending to think about it.

“I could eat.”

A raindrop hits her shoulder. “Good,” she says, getting up and tossing him the end of the leash while he pulls his hood back up. Bird leaps down to follow her, tongue lolling. “There’s this diner on the corner of 54th and 11th, free coffee before 6, you’ll love it.”

“Yeah? No shit?”

“No shit.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "GOD BLESS THE RAGE IN US.  
> ITS HOW WE KNOW EACH OTHER."
> 
> -Terrance Hayes, Lighthead
> 
> (come chat w me on tumblr @theworthofhollin)


	2. sounds overly valorous; sounds like penance

 

i.              The first time they meet for coffee, the sudden deluge outside is ostensibly the only reason Bird is allowed inside the diner. But honestly, she’s 90% sure that Frank does something while he's standing at her back that makes the owner turn white and mutter ‘sure, yeah, I love dogs, dogs are great,” before scrambling back to hide in the kitchen.

 

He orders the 6-egg omelet. She orders a stack of blueberry pancakes. They don’t talk much, but they don’t need to. The rain is hammering against the windowpane, and the electric buzz of the half-lit ‘open’ sign hums under her skin, and Bird’s head is flopped over her feet under the table, and its…nice. It’s good. She doesn’t even call him out for feeding Bird little bits of sausage on the side. Well, not much.

 

“You’re gonna spoil him,” she says, chewing around a mouthful. He glances at her guiltily as she waves her fork at him, but she’s grinning. His hand disappears below the lip of the table again, and she can hear the wet smack of Bird’s lips as he gobbles another piece down.

 

“So?”

 

“He’s gonna get fat,” she says, for the sake of argument.

 

Frank looks at her blankly. “Really? ’Cause it’s fucking bikini season?”

 

“Shut up,” she mutters, and tears off a piece of pancake to slip under the table without looking at him. Bird slobbers happily over her hand in thanks.

 

She glances up in time to see the smile pull across his face. It makes her chest ache for a moment, watching him shift and tug at the brim of his hat, constantly moving with nowhere to go. Karen taps her mouth with one finger and points at the healing split in his. “What happened here?”

 

Frank runs a knuckle over the lip in question, but doesn’t hesitate. “Albanian,” he answers, easily, as if its nothing, not even worth a mention, and honestly it probably isn’t. He watches her reaction over the rim of his coffee cup. She takes her time, weighing the emotions roiling within her chest, before she asks: “What’d they do?”

 

“Taking Russian territory. Stealing street kids. Selling ‘em.” He’s blunt, not giving her the details that she already knows, but daring her to comment. She'd heard the Albanian mob was circling in on the docks, dipping some hands in the trade routes left behind, but she hadn't known the extent of it. Karen stares down at her pancakes, the blueberries swimming in syrup.

 

“The kids,” she asks. “Are they alright?”

 

“Yeah. Most ran off as soon as they could, but…” he furrows his brow. “They know how to take care of each other. They’re not stupid.”

 

“And the smugglers? Dead?” Her voice sounds so strange in her ears. She thinks about the gun in her bedroom, and Wesley's smooth voice echoing in the wide expanse of the dock storage warehouse. The panicked sense of _nothing_ , the grimy taste of the coarse black bag thrown over her head, the whole world gone dark. The breathless punch of the trigger pulling six times in an empty room, the wet thump of the bullets hitting the meat of his chest, the click of the empty chamber. (The part she doesn’t think about: the heady triumph in the silence after; how, for one grasping moment, her unforgiveness was absolute.)

 

He sneaks another piece of sausage under the table. The shock of Bird shifting excitedly against her leg draws her back to the present. “Yeah,” he says. “After a while.”

 

“Okay.” She says it, and finds that she means it. Frank is honest. Frank doesn’t lie, no matter how ugly the truth is. He won’t protect her from it, because he expects her to protect herself. She doesn’t like it, but she understands—god, she understands. “Okay.”

 

Across the table, he’s still staring at her, a brow raised like he’s surprised, but doesn’t want to show it. He makes a sound at the back of his throat, like a _huh_ , thoughtful. From under the tabletop, Bird licks cheerfully at her hand.

 

“Okay,” she says, one more time, stirring her coffee with the handle of her knife. “Pass the sugar, would you?”

 

 

ii.             It becomes a thing, another irregular aspect of her mornings. These moments, where she’ll walk Bird through the park and sometimes he’ll be there, sitting on that bench, waiting. Sometimes he won’t. And when he is, they go to the diner on the corner, and they’ll order the same pancakes and omelet, and Frank will finish 5 cups of dark roast before the sun comes up and she won’t nag him for sneaking bits of food under the table, and she doesn’t ask about the bloodstains—but she sees them, and he doesn’t bring up the bags under her eyes—but he sees them. They don’t hide. And somehow… somehow, it’s good. It’s ugly and open and shamelessly sincere, but it’s good.

 

She feels the most awake when she’s with him, even when they don’t speak at all. As if the only real things left in the city are right here in this diner, silent over pancakes and coffee, and when she walks back outside she’s just…someplace else, another place, another dream.

 

 

 

iii.             He asks her about Matt, just on a whim: “how’s _Murdock_ ,” dragging out the name like he always does, and when she’s tells him its over, they haven’t spoken in weeks, she’s moved on—the look on his face is what she thinks disappointment might be on anyone else, but on Frank, it looks a little bit like indigestion.

 

“Bullshit,” he says.

 

She sighs, and rolls her eyes. “It didn’t work out, alright?” She’s very intensely not thinking about Matt’s red glasses flashing in the office light, the raw open look on his face when he stood there, expecting two years of lies to melt away in the dark and instead listening to her say ‘no.’ Frank leans back into the booth.

 

“Thought you were all about the truth.”

 

She levels a glare at him and he stares, unimpressed. “Don’t be an asshole, Frank.” She fiddles with a piece of blueberry on the edge of her plate. “It’s complicated.”

 

He takes a sip of his coffee and scrunches his nose. Considering how often it must’ve been broken, she wonders if it hurts when he does it, if its just instinct and he forgets. He doesn’t react either way. “Complicated. Ain’t it always.” The bruises around his mouth look like stones in dark water. “So the fact that you two were,“ he spins a loose circle in the air with his finger, nebulously, ”just head over heels means …shit, is what I’m hearing?”

 

“Shut up,” she mutters, knowing how she sounds like a child. The waitress, a pale, dark haired woman who looks just as exhausted as Karen, makes her way over to their booth at the back. When Frank looks over and rolls his eyes at her, a little bit too dramatic, as if to say ‘can you believe this girl?’ the woman hides a small smile behind the curtain of her hair. Karen feels a raw bloom of fondness in her chest.

The waitress leaves after filling both cups to the brim, her steps unerringly silent on the linoleum. Frank takes a sip of what must be scorching hot coffee and waits patiently, and Karen feels the words start to rise in her chest, unbidden.

“I’m not…” she pauses, dipping the tip of her finger into the scalding liquid for just long enough for the skin to recognize the pain, before wiping it on the lip and continuing. “I’m not good. He thought I was so…good.” She says the word like a throwaway curse, unintentional. “And when I was with him, I thought I was too.”

 

Frank doesn’t say anything, not to correct to her or to concur; he just waits, watching her steadily from underneath too-long lashes. Everything in her says to stop talking, to shut up, but now that she’s started, she can’t.

 

“I understand that people like that are meant to hurt you, that relationships are painful and messy and all that, but with Matt…” she tries to find a way to articulate it without giving too much away. “It was never …even. It was like an imbalance of power. He never kept me on his level. I was always there, sitting alone, waiting for him to clean up his messes and no matter how much I think I could’ve loved him, maybe— I refuse to be some,” her mouth twists strangely around the words,” some _victim_ , shunted aside in his life. Nobody gets that kind of power over me unless I give it to them.” She glances up, almost having forgotten Frank is still there. He’s motionless, dark eyes sharp on her as she hunches in on herself. She breathes out again, continues. “I don’t think he meant to do that, or anything, Matt’s not like that, putting people on these pedestals—but he was always… just a little bit too late to make it right.”

 

The coffee in her mug is still too hot for her to drink, but she wraps both hands around the ceramic and lets the warmth bleed through to her fingers. Karen closes her eyes. Frank still doesn’t speak.

 

“I’m just so _tired_ ,” she says softly, unthinkingly honest. Suddenly the exhaustion in her bones feels utterly palpable, like she’s being dragged down under the booth, through the floor, like the ground is ready to just swallow her up. Bird shifts from his position on top of her feet, reacting to her anxiety. “I know I have to, there’s no such thing as being able to live in a place like this and not hide something, or whatever, but there are so many secrets and it scares me how easily I’m learning to hide those, too.” Her voice cracks, but she can’t stop talking. “Because I get it, its about safety, some things are better left in the dark, blah blah blah, but I don’t want it. Everything in my life feels _fake_. I’m tired of it. I’m just…god, I’m so tired.”

 

She flexes her hand around the coffee cup and pulls in a breath. She can feel her blush rising into her cheeks as a result of her mini-breakdown, and she ducks her head. Frank is quiet for a moment, until he hums to himself and looks to the window. The diner sign lights up the left sign of his face in a red glow. It’s strangely flattering, softening the harsh angles of his features. Smoothing out the scars. His mouth curves outwards, not a smile so much as a stretched out pull of contemplation.

 

She’s expecting some grand gesture of advice, one of his heartfelt, aggressive monologues from his Life Before, some wisdom that expressly serves to make her feel guilty and shamed for her sad little girl problems, and she’s ready for it, she is, but all he says is: “I hate cats.”

 

Karen blinks. “…what?”

 

Frank shifts, tugging at his ballcap again. He’s never still; a constant form in motion, half-wild, as if his body itself is the boundary he’s forever pushing at. (It used to put her on-edge, as if something was going to spill out in his anger, something uncontained, but now she knows it’s just how he reacts to being uncomfortable.)

 

“I hate cats.” He says again, slower this time, like maybe she didn’t hear him. “I’m allergic. Lisa… shit, she wanted one for the longest time, but I always said no, hell no, because I could never sleep with them fuckin’ furballs lyin’ around. But …I like dogs.” He rubs a hand over his mouth roughly before reaching down to scratch at Bird’s ears. His hands curve over Bird’s head, unerringly gentle. “I woulda’ got them a dog, I think. Maybe for Christmas, when Frankie got big enough.”

 

She doesn’t know what to say at first, his words sitting raw as a wound on the table between them. And then it clicks, and her mouth opens of its own volition, and words spill back out like a distorted thank you.

 

“Yeah,” she breathes, and it so quiet in the diner the silence shudders around them. “Yeah, my little brother was like that. He’s, uh,“ Karen swallows, her brow furrowing. “He’s dead now, but. I forget sometimes. I forget he’s dead.”

 

The silence shifts around them, balancing out.

 

Frank’s eyes are sharp, unblinking, obsidian black in the reddish light, but not sad. He shrugs, casually, and looks towards the window again. Its still dark out, but the sun will be up soon. “Yeah. Yeah, I know.”

 

iv.            She starts giving him secrets like gifts. Like it’s a part of the meal to be consumed like anything else, like coffee and eggs and strange little confessions, small little tidbits of herself swallowed down between bites. He doesn’t always reciprocate, but he doesn’t have to. He listens, humming a reply each time, sometimes an answer or a nod or nothing at all. Sometimes she starts small: “I hate sriracha. It makes me sick,” or “I studied art history in college. It was…incredibly useless, I know.” He barks out a laugh when she tells him she was her high school’s homecoming queen, and something about the gravel in the sound, the broken roughness, the utter disuse in the act makes her determined to hear it again.

 

He doesn’t ask her about the gun, but sometimes she takes it with her in her purse and she has a feeling he knows its there. Something in his eyes; like interest, or approval, but warmer.

           

 v.             She sleeps sometimes, and doesn’t dream.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> HE WANTS TO BE TENDER AND MERCIFUL./ THAT SOUNDS OVERLY VALOROUS./  
> SOUNDS LIKE PENANCE. AND HIS HANDS? HIS HANDS KEEP TURNING INTO BIRDS/ AND   
> FLYING AWAY FROM HIM./ HIM BEING YOU./ YES./ DO YOU LOVE YOURSELF?/ I DON’T HAVE TO ANSWER THAT./ IT SHOULD MATTER.
> 
> -Richard Siken, Unfinished Duets

**Author's Note:**

> (come chat w me @theworthofhollin.tumblr.com)


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